Urban Theory vs Urban Reality

The Hoyt Diagram is taken from Bruegmann's Sprawl (and then colorized.) [see Finally Some Sanity.] Thanks to everyone's favorite New Yorker for the income diagram.

Traveling in Time

Most dire warnings of impending doom, as well as most rosy scenarios of flying cars, suffer from extrapolating the past into the future. Which would be fine, if the future ever held up its end of the bargain and cooperated. Image the questions a traveler from, say, 1750 would want to know: “Wow, with that many people, how do you find enough forest for firewood?” (A real and pressing question at some points in France and England.) “If only 3% of your population is agricultural, do most people starve? Have you evolved to a species that doesn’t need to eat as much?” “If everyone lives in the city, doesn’t the pestilence wipe it out from time to time? Are there rivers of manure in the streets?” “If the economies are counted in the trillions of dollars, wherever did you find all of that gold?”

The point is that maybe we’re not asking the right questions. History tells us that self-immolation and self-restriction of the status quo rarely shows the path forward. (Think Spain in the Sixteenth Century.) Usually framing the question as “what can we do to get what we want with fewer or better inputs?” more often does the trick. Wood is replaced by coal which is replaced by oil which is replaced by gas which is replaced by . . . . my money’s on electricity. (I wonder if I should make that literal . . . . ) That’s not to say that rudderless ideas of “something will fix the problem,” are necessarily the way to go, just that the solution will come out of inputs and outputs, not fetishising bad outcomes.

As an example: Rather than asking “how do we get rid of sprawl?” one could ask, “what, exactly, would allow people to live they way they would enjoy the most?” and go from there.

More or Less?

This is taken from Myths of Rich & Poor by Michael Cox and Richard Alm. Real wages, as we've heard, have been going down. (In constant numbers, yadda, yadda, yadda.) However (as the chart shows,) the cost of food (in labor) has gone down even as the price has gone up. [The chart is for the USA.]

This asks some interesting questions: Are real wages going down because so much other stuff has been added to the CPI? (consumer price index) When budget proportions change, (I'm thinking of housing vs. food,) does it make an apples-to-apples comparison still possible. How much of purchasing power is affected by the bidding-up phenomenon Elizabeth Warren points out in The Two Income Trap? Does it make the numbers more unreliable? And what, for that matter, does Robert Reich think of all of this?

Smart Growth? Are they kidding?

Continuing Education is one of the begrudgingly accepted duties of life as as professional. The National Council of Architectural Registration Boards puts out a series of education packets for the anti-social professional, and I just couldn’t pass up the one labeled “smart growth.” A quick summary of one chapter:

Getting to Smart Growth: 100 Policies for Implementation

1. Enact an inclusionary zoning ordinance for new housing developments.
2. Provide home buyer assistance through support to community land trusts.
3. Revise zoning and building codes to permit a wider variety of housing types.
4. Plan and zone for affordable and manufactured housing development in rural areas.
5. Educate developers of multifamily housing units and nonprofits on the use of limited-equity (or equity-restriction) components.
6. Educate realtors, lenders and home buyers on the use of resource-efficient mortgages.
7. Implement a program to identify and dispose of vacant and abandoned buildings.
8. Adopt special rehabilitation building codes to regulate the renovation of existing structures.
9. Enlist local jurisdictions in implementing a regional fair-share housing allocation plan across metropolitan areas.
10. Give priority to smart growth projects and programs that foster smart growth in the allocation of federal housing and community development block grant (and other) funds.

What’s telling about this list is that there’s not an item on it that’s actually architectural. I’m not sure what one’s supposed to do with this list, as I can’t remember the last time a client asked me to write legislation. Implement a program to identify vacant buildings? As part of which contract? Maybe the packet was intended for the American Bar Association (come to think of it, they’d probably provide them with a list of constitutional amendments.)

Property rights. Market forces. Supply and demand. These are the ideas left out of much of the discussion, but the critical steps between theory and reality. Subsidy, proscription, involuntary collective – the paternalistic imperative permeates so much of this movement. I, for one, refuse to believe that it’s necessary to recreate the city at the point of the sheriff’s gun. Perhaps it’s the way the choices between street and street are presented, and crude assumptions made about the demands of the market, that land the community where it is.

Epigram for the Contrarian Philosopher

Optimism: We should not learn from history, because then we would not repeat it. If we did not repeat it, we would end up somewhere other than here, and we're happy here.

The Eighteenth-Century Parking Lot

This is the part of architectural history they don't teach you. I came across this little jem in a history of Frederick the Great. The new (and first) Opera House in Berlin opened in 1742. What's fascinating is the description: "It was a beautiful and supremely comfortable building with room for a thousand carriages to park outside." [emphasis mine]

This was not only pre-automobile, it was pre-railroad. Perhaps the problem is mass affluence after all.

Vox Populi

Every couple of years D magazine publishes an article ranking the various Dallas suburbs in order of desirability. Perhaps surprisingly, my little urban neighborhood of University Park usually comes in at number one or two, which is odd because it’s in the center of the city (check out the map in the article.) The independent government and school district make it qualify as a “suburb,” I suppose. The fascinating parts of the article are the criteria they use. This gives a pretty good idea of what the average (at least in their estimation) suburbanite wants (much like the Morning News poll), which dovetails nicely with the theory of the perceptions of suburbs I’ve been observing.

Their criteria are fourfold:

1) Education. This is simply the percentage of students in the local district passing the State tests, the mean SAT Score (check the Park Cities in the sidebar,) and money per student spent on instruction. This gives an idea, regardless of distance or configuration, of the importance of school districts. It also pays to be an independent entity.

2) Housing. This is a stacked deck against the urban environment. Half the score is determined by the percentage of housing that is owner-occupied. Multi-family housing is, by their definition, undesirable regardless of its quality or size. The second (and more rational) criterion is average sale price. Note how much better the more urban suburbs do in this one.

3) Safety. Simple crime statistics – with double weight given to the violent crimes in the index. Crime comes up time after time in discussions of cities (and even in these pages.) True or not, the central city has a serious perception problem.

4) Ambience and Air Quality. While the air quality statistic is fairly prosaic, it’s nice to see someone finally acknowledging the human environment. The question is: exactly how important is the look and feel of a place to live to someone’s mental calculus?

Of course, what’s missing are the transportation and economic factors in each city. Does walkability matter (other than as a contributor to “ambience”?) Commute times were specifically disregarded, which is partially due to suburban assumptions, and partially due to Dallas’ place as a new kind of city with more suburb-to-suburb commuting.

This is the problem I’m trying to work out. There are the criteria above from the demand side, the making-a-buck criteria from the supply side, and their intersection in both how you execute it and what the long-term impact is. Surely a fully functioning community is worth more that the “ambience” of a suburb by a lake. It just has to be.

Independence Day

[a draft]

The market for labor is not free. In an ideal Smithian world one would sell their labor to the bidder offering the best deal for it, and do so until someone offered a better deal. Unfortunately, the process doesn’t work with Smithian efficiency. In fact, the market for labor is horribly inefficient – almost opaque.

No one should ask you who your employer is. You should not have one. There is no need for citizens to be defined by a single arrangement made under duress with a lack of good information. There is a contradictory assumption of employment-at-will lack of control and the overwhelming necessity of having a name to put in the blank for every form you fill out. i.e. the only control you have is to give up the ability to be healed when sick, compound your savings, find new housing, or even get a call from your dentist. The actual terms of employment are rarely published, often arbitrarily changed, and not negotiated – shouldn’t there be a two-way discussion required before changing the terms of the deal? This kind of arrangement leads too often to a vicious cycle of management exercising arbitrary power and labor, realizing that their best interests are not involved, undermining management, which then makes even more draconian policy changes, and so on into disaster. This, I think, is a large part of what Uncle Karl meant by alienation of labor; when the only stake someone has in the arrangement is a paycheck, they’ll not help in the process of one that exploits them, i.e. when work harms rather than helps, it loses its intrinsic value and becomes something negative. (This, perhaps, the reason that lower income inexplicably correlates to worse health?) Could anyone really expect loyalty or innovation if it would only serve to line the pockets of someone that treats them like the enemy?

The European model tries to address the abuses of opacity, but puts in place a system of capital barriers that make any alternate arrangement more difficult. If you can’t terminate an agreement, you can’t even enter into it unless you have sufficient resources to cover all foreseeable situations. While preventing nasty things by management, it also makes the pool of capital required to become management larger and larger, concentrating things further. How, I wonder, does one work as a freelancer? At least they seem to have the healthcare problem worked out (or at least portable) but the choices of places to go with this portability are fewer and fewer.

Solutions:
1) Clearer, more equitable agreements with true informed consent.
2) True mutual benefit arrangements (which can be very simple) that align everyone’s interests together and eliminate perverse incentives.
3) Shifting decision-making power back from the large entity to the individual (or maybe the government, if absolutely necessary.)
4) Reducing or destroying all capital and regulatory barriers to alternate arrangements. (That make them real alternatives, not a reclassification in name only.)